The present invention relates to a cleaning device for cleaning a toner in an electrophotographic image forming apparatus such as a printer, a facsimile machine or a copier, and also relates to an image forming apparatus having the cleaning device.
In an electrophotographic image forming method, an image is formed through a charging process, an exposing process, a developing process, a transferring process, a fixing process and a cleaning process. Recently, with the increasing demand for higher precision and reproduction of image quality, a spherical toner has become widely used instead of a pulverized toner. The spherical toner exhibits more excellent transferring efficiency than the pulverized toner, and facilitates attaining high resolution. However, the spherical toner has a smooth surface, and is less likely to be caught by a cleaning blade, compared with the pulverized toner. Therefore, the spherical toner is more likely to pass through the cleaning blade, and adhere to a surface of a charging member, which causes a deterioration of image quality. In order to enable cleaning of the spherical toner in the electrophotographic image forming method, there is proposed a developer obtained by mixing a spherical toner and indeterminate-shape particles (see, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2003-5434).